I would like to work out the current time since a date and time specified.
If the specified data is : 19/01/2013 16:44:00
and now the time is : 19/01/2013 16:45:00
the difference is 0 years 0 months 0 days 0 hours 1 minute 0 seconds
This can be done easily just by taking the current time and minus the previous time and format it but this is hard to crunch data so what I wish to do is break each date/time segment into its own cell
Let's say cell A1 has the previous time and cell A2 has the current time
Cells a5 trough f5 would contain 0 years 0 months 0 days 0 hours 1 minute 0 seconds
On a second note on this question is it possible to force the =NOW() to update every x seconds via VBA without interaction?
You can't use YEAR function to get year difference because that will give 1 year between 31st December 2012 and 1st Jan 2013 when there is only one day.....
....similarly you can have problems with MONTH and DAY (e.g. MONTH always returns a number between 1 and 12 whereas in this context you would only expect numbers between 0 and 11)
Try DATEDIF for the first 3 then HOUR, MINUTE, SECOND as Justin suggests
Assuming start date/time in A2 and end date/time in B2 try these formulas respectively for Years, Months, Days, Hours, Minutes and Seconds
=DATEDIF(A2,B2-(MOD(A2,1)>MOD(B2,1)),"y")
=DATEDIF(A2,B2-(MOD(A2,1)>MOD(B2,1)),"ym")
=DATEDIF(A2,B2-(MOD(A2,1)>MOD(B2,1)),"md")
=HOUR(B2-A2)
=MINUTE(B2-A2)
=SECOND(B2-A2)
format all cells as general
You may get some discrepancies because of variable month/year lengths......